Event-based Internet is going to be something you will hear more about this year. Though I had heard the term used, the first real application of it that I experienced was a game. But don't think this is all about fun and games. Look online and you will find examples of event-based Internet biosurveillance and event-based Internet robot teleoperation systems and other very sophisticated uses, especially connected to the Internet of Things (IoT).

What did more than a million people do this past Sunday night at 9pm ET? They tuned in on their mobile devices to HQ Trivia, a game show, on their phones.

The HQ app has had early issues in scaling to the big numbers with game delays, video lag and times when the game just had to be rebooted. But it already has at least one imitator called "The Q" which looks almost identical in design, and imitation is supposed to be a form of flattery.

This 12-question trivia quiz has money prizes. Usually, the prize is $2000, but sometimes it jumps to $10 or $20K. But since there are multiple survivors of the 12 questions that win, the prizes are often less than $25 each.

Still, I see the show's potential (Is it actually a "show?") Business model? Sponsors, commercial breaks, sponsors and product placement in the questions, answers and banter in-between questions.

The bigger trend here is that this is a return to TV "appointment viewing." Advertisers like that and it only really occurs these days with sports, some news and award shows. (HQ pulled in its first audience of more than a million Sunday during the Golden Globe Awards, so...)

And is there some education connection in all this? Event-based Internet, like its TV equivalent, is engaging. Could it bring back "The Disconnected" learner?

Event-based distributed systems are being used in areas such as enterprise management, information dissemination, finance,
environmental monitoring and geo-spatial systems.

Education has been "event-based" for hundreds of years. But learners have been time-shifting learning via distance education and especially via online learning for only a few decades. Event-based learning sounds a bit like hybrid or blended learning. But one difference is that learners are probably not going to tune in and be engaged with just a live lecture. Will it take a real event and maybe even gamification to get live learning?

In all my years teaching online, I have never been able to have all of a course's student attend a "live" session either because of time zone differences, work schedules or perhaps content that just wasn't compelling enough.

There are so many posts I have the past few weeks about trend for education and technology, but one way of seeing what trends may emerge this year is by looking at the tracks, presentations and keynote speakers at EdTech conferences.

I'll be moderating a track next week at NJEdge.Net's Annual Conference: NJEdgeCon2018 "DIGITAL LEADERSHIP & ENTERPRISE TRANSFORMATION" January 11 & 12, 2018 in New Jersey. My track is, naturally, Education and Technology which has presentations on best practices, innovations and the effectiveness associated with current LMS and online learning tools, effective infrastructure, resources, sustainability models and integrated assessment tools.

But if you look at the other tracks offered, you can see that INFORMATION Technology outweighs instructional technology here. Other tracks at the conference are Big Data & Analytics, Networking & Data Security, Customer Support & Service Excellence, Aligning Business & Technology Strategies. and Transformation Products & Services.

Amber Mac (as in MacArthur) will talk about adaptation and the accelerating pace of corporate culture in the digital economy.

I have followed her career for a decade from her early tech TV and podcast venture to her current consulting business. She helps companies adapt to, anticipate, and capitalize on lightning-quick changes—from leadership to social media to the Internet of Things, from marketing to customer service to digital parenting and beyond. It’s not about innovation, she says; it’s about adaptation.

When it comes to teachers and technologies, the battle cry of Virginia Tech professor John Boyer is embrace, not replace. In his talk, he presents his view that the best teachers will embrace technologies that help them better communicate with students, but do not fear because those technologies will never replace human to human interaction. But blending the best communicators with the best technology has to offer will produce some amazing and unpredictable opportunities!

Wayne Brown, CEO and Founder of Center for Higher Ed CIO Studies (CHECS), will talk in his session on longitudinal higher education CIO research and the importance of technology leaders aligning technology innovations and initiatives with the needs of the higher education institution. His two-part survey methodology enables him to compare and contrast multiple perspectives about higher education technology leaders. The results provide essential information regarding the experiences and background an individual should possess to serve as a higher education CIO. In collaboration with NJEdge, Wayne will collect data from NJEdge higher education CIOs and will compare the national results with those of the NJ CIOs.

Timothy Renick (a man of many titles: Vice President for Enrollment Management and Student Success, Vice Provost, and Professor of Religious Studies at Georgia State University) is talking about "Using Data and Analytics to Eliminate Achievement Gaps." The student-centered and analytics-informed programs at GSU has raised graduation rates by 22% and closed all achievement gaps based on race, ethnicity, and income-level. It now awards more bachelor’s degrees to African Americans than any other college or university in the nation. Through a discussion of innovations ranging from chatbots and predictive analytics to meta-majors and completion grants, the session covers lessons learned from Georgia State’s transformation and outlines several practical and low-cost steps that campuses can take to improve outcomes for underserved students.

Greg Davies' topic is "The Power of Mobile Communications Strategies and Predictive Analytics for Student Success and Workforce Development." The technology that has been used to transform, to both good and bad ends, most other major industries can connect the valuable resources available on campus to the students who need them most with minimal human resources. Technology has been used to personalize the digital experience in such industries as banking, retail, information and media, and others by reaching consumers via mobile technology. Higher Education has, in some cases, been slow to adapt innovative and transformative technology. Yet, its power to transform the student engagement and success experience has been proven. With the help of thought leaders in industry and education, Greg discusses how the industry can help achieve the goal of ubiquity in the use of innovative student success technologies and predictive data analytics to enable unprecedented levels of student success and, as a consequence, workforce development.

Though there are differences, you will often find the terms Learning Community, Learning Circle and Community of Practice used interchangeably. They are all groups of individuals who learn from each other, and with each other, on an ongoing basis with the goal of improving their work.

Like any network of people, communities of practice are generally self-organized by people who share common work practice. As with the other labels, any of these relationship groupings have a desire to share what they know, support one another, and create new knowledge for their field of practice.

But communities of practice (CoP) differ from networks in that they are intended to be "communities" in which people make a commitment to be there for each other. They should participate not just for their own needs, but to serve the needs of others.

A CoP is very "open source" with a commitment to advance the field of practice and to make their resources and knowledge available to anyone, especially those doing related work.

A learning circle is a highly interactive, participatory structure for organizing group work. The goal is to build, share, and express knowledge though a process of open dialogue and deep reflection around issues or problems with a focus on a shared outcome.

Online learning circles take advantage of social networking tools to manage collaborative work over distances following a timeline from the open to close of the circle. Learning circles usually have a final project or goal which collects the shared knowledge generated during the interactions. Learning circles are a way to organize learning in global projects. They are also being used in Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs).

The headline came up this week in my feed, "5 Education themes that impacted the industry in 2017." The caveat, perhaps, is that this story ran in the India Times, which made me curious how different those trends might be from the U.S.

They mention that trying to show ROI from earlier trends (flipped classrooms, multilingual learning, faculty professional development, gamification, personalized and adaptive learning, online secure infrastructure, knowledge networks and virtual simulated practice environments etc.) and being pushed to stay ahead of the technology curve might make adoption of newer trends more difficult. Education apps for content, distribution, and collaboration are also in the mix.

In India, the e-learning market hit almost 11 billion in USD in 2016. Here are the 5 trends seen there this year in brief (in this article's perspective).

Safeguarding Personal Identifiable Information (PII) - Our digital footprints - both intentional and unintentional ones - leave learners open to even more vulnerabilities than the average citizen, but losing data and reputation besides the financial damage and emotional distress and overall risk. 4

Gamification, Simulations and Digital Badging - this has been a "trend" for so many years without ever being fully realized that I wonder if it belongs on trend lists any more. Yes, phone apps use gamification as a technique to keep you hooked through notifications, points, and rewards, so that learners are already used to using to them - and probably expect them in many instances. I still don't see a widely accepted of awarding achievement or recognition.

Leveraging Learning Analytics - AI plays a role in making it possible for a machine to learn over millions of interaction inputs and predict student errors, trends and projections.